Unnatural Link warnings, Conspiracy theory?

Welcome to Neil Walker who has written this guest post for the David Naylor site….

The SEO World has had its biggest shake up in years in 2012, for as long as I have been involved with Search (ten years plus) Google always said: "Build great content and we will do the rest". Of course the reams of SEO's over the years said make sure you build natural anchor text and only use what was called "white hat" methods of link building, but even the term "white hat" is muddied these days with what is now SEO and in practice the other methods worked so much better and for me until 2012 have never really posed a problem but I will leave the debate of what is white hat/black hat today it has been covered enough, my personal opinion is as SEO's we manipulate full stop.

So from my perspective when I first got involved with Search I like most SEO's learnt from experience so I had a handful of my own sites where I tried all sorts of tactics, hidden text, over optimised text/images, duplicate text with subtle keyword changes, buying vast quantity of poor quality links, buying small quantities of high quality links, gaining links more naturally through PR or traditional prospecting/outreach and of course content driven links and link bait. I witnessed back in 2007/8 the over optimisation of anchor text finally mean something when sites that ranked top 10 for big keywords fell to pages 2,3 and beyond. Of course the first tactic was to "build more stronger links"  which inevitably only pushed your result further down the SERP's. This to me was the first time I saw Google actually getting to grips or putting a focus on SEO manipulation. They had of course carried out other changes and the advantage of being across the water from America is that we are not so much in the spotlight of Mr Cutts and Friends, but the above was the first that affected me and my clients directly after 6-7 years. As Search engine evolved so did our tactics to manipulate their listings to get over the above in the past I did one of the following in various cases:

Simply dilute the link profile (Took a long time but eventually worked)

Change the URL being optimised (Moved towards an inner page for a chosen keyword)

301 redirected the domain (Instant wins)

The next major update was Panda, now I didn't see as much of an affect from this, I'd encouraged unique content to be written for years and so when Google clamped down on content with the panda updates the majority of the clients I dealt with were untouched. However 2012 has been the big change because it seems Google took its intentions with Panda on improving content to improve links.

So firstly let's set some so called facts!

"many site owners are trying to build a good reputation for their sites, and some believe that having poor-quality incoming links can be perceived as “being part of a bad neighbourhood,” which over time might harm their site’s ranking. If your site receives links that look similarly dodgy, don’t be alarmed… read on! While it’s true that linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithms, it’s just one of many." Or "keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms. If you want to make sure Google knows about these links and is valuing them appropriately, feel free to bring them to our attention using either our spam report or our paid links report."Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin & Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Kirkland
Friday, October 16, 2009 at 4:53 PM

This was key that Google would in essence devalue bad links against your site as appose to place a penalty as this would open up the world to "negative SEO", this was a safe bet for SEO in my eyes, as I never used FFA links or blatant farms which were picked up by Google back in 2003 and beyond, so this meant that as I advised clients what we did and the risks but they were confident that Google wasn't suddenly going to change the rules, well it did.

So what’s changed?

We'll Google started to send messages out to website owners through GWT advising them that they had "unnatural links", this initial tactic scared SEO's to start revealing what links they had paid for and built, this started at in 2011, Google then put this into overdrive in 2012:

(The graph above is an accumulation of Agency messages by volume "Numbers have been removed)

Thank you for everyone's data, you know who you are but my apologies if I didn't link to you for gratification

So around march 18-22nd 2012 the SEO community went "uh oh!" and then came the onslaught; the community caught on to the fact that Google changed the wording on the possibility of negative SEO:

In 2007:

There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

2012:

Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

They key change in messaging means that link can now potentially harm your site, for me taking away the negative SEO aspect this is not something that new, in extreme cases we have seen negative SEO or the phrase "Blue hat" many years ago, but does this change the way people build links. It is common for an SEO to look at a website competitors links and then place content and incentivise to the site to gain a link for their website, SEO's need to tread carefully in this area.

Some Clarity

Firstly let's make things clear:

Receiving a "Unnatural links" message from Google and being affected by Penguin are two different things, Penguin is an algorithmic change about over optimisation if you didn't receive a message and lost ranking you need to take a look at your entire SEO, from links to technical.

The next is we all caught on to the number 700,000 link warnings were sent out, this is not actually true according to Matt Cutts in a presentation at SMX Advanced in Seattle only 3% of this 700,000K were link warnings the rest were a combination of the other messages such as "traffic change" "Wordpress updates" etc. so this means potentially only approx. 21,000 messages were sent out!!

So what's the Conspiracy theory?

So above I've presented official statements from Google. Now I've had the pleasure of meeting a lot of SEO's and talking with them about the message from Google but I simply don't know every SEO in the world and from the number of message I'm aware of that would constitute to a reasonable percentage of the figure Matt presented, so how accurate is that. But in terms of conspiracy theory I think the best analogy I can give you is from @fantomaster at SASCON where he described the scenario of the messages like the Gestapo. In essence Google has sent out thousands of warnings to bait SEO's.

As a community we have then simply divided; everyone has run for cover, the outing started, then as a community we have simply sent Google lists and list of links we think might be bad, not a bad tactic if you want to reveal more networks or other sources of links.

So what's the Problem, I hear the self-proclaimed white hats say?

Think about that nice bit of outreach you did, or the link bait you did which encouraged that site to link to you and then "oh", someone just included that site in their reinclusion request, doesn't look so white anymore… That site may stand the manual review, something which as someone who has run networks and still does I like.

So I received a message what should I do?

The key here is there are a lot of different messages but which one did you receive?

Below you can see the main message the community is talking about "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.yoursite.com/"

So what's gone on?

I have seen and am aware of a number of these messages through personal sites, people I network with or one form or another and the community each has a different opinion; but this is what I have seen:

This is what I get overall from my detailed talks with other industry professionals, you may have your own opinion but the data I gathered was enough to advise what has happened after a site has received a message more than 70 days ago:

50% of sites had no affect at all in rankings

20% of sites had small drop on specific keyword phrases

20% had big drops on specific phrases

10% had complete fall out on phrases and brand

The community itself is divided into:

Submit a reinclusion request and advise Google of all the links you have done which you feel may be "unnatural"

After personally speaking with Pierre Far (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) he advised you should submit a reinclusion (But this goes in line with the conspiracy that you have bad links!)

Others say don't do a reinclusion request just change the way you build links and carry on.

After seeing some sites receive a message and no change in rankings why wouldn't you do this?

Also some sites do not have GWT installed so how would you know?

Let's look at the first option, speaking with Dave Naylor regarding this he felt that Google would have a few pools of links, one which is the list they suspect are bad, a second pool of links which have been identified by site owners in their reconsideration request as the information comes in from requests; Google can match up links and then notify more sites or if a number of sites mention the links in pool two they will be moved into pool 1 and more sites notified of unnatural links.

I have personally seen some sites which were hit hard but have seen slow recovery when building more links indicating a "link devaluation" as appose to a "penalty." I'm also aware that there has been a lot of 301 redirects carried out which seems to have removed the effect of loss in rankings, some sites have gone down the reconsideration route and removed link and gained their listings back while others have gone far worse after they requested reconsideration.

Removing links:

For those who have read up on this a lot you will be aware that "link networks got hit" these are network of websites, blogs, forums etc. which have been put up (Normally quiet cleverly) to manipulate links.

Let's make some thing clear if you can make a website which looks natural, has unique (Non Spun) content, is updated regularly , has people linking to it, has comments on articles, links to various sources then how do you know if this part of a Network?

I can be quite clear some network got hit… A lot didn't.. and as I said in the start of this article SEO evolves and so will the networks, I'm not going to discuss what factors can make a network distinguishable from a normal site today I'm afraid.

Networks have worked for years and years and it seems 2012 has been the big year for Google to try and deal with them, if you site was linked on a network detected by Google, then chances are that is why you received the message above.

My Suggestions:

Remove links from those network(s)

Build more links (Maybe easier said than done, but there are plenty of methods.)

Make your profile look natural include no follows, beware of the site you want to gain a link from, Network or Non Network you should be able to identify will this link stand up to a manual review?

If you don't see any increase..

File reconsideration request; but initially look at the rest of your links, tools such as www.linkdetective.com can identify the types of links you have look especially at "sidebar links" they seem to be more toxic over article based links.

The difficulty in removing links is that you often don't know which ones have been identified by Google. In a test I carried out on a personal site which had 54 links, 40 from a network 14 genuine business directories, I removed all but two of the network links and after I sent a reinclusion request in Google's message back to me was the site still violated Google's quality guidelines with only 16 links left pointing to the site .

Another tactic I have found to identify bad links is see if they are still spidered in Google, I'm aware that if Google finds a network site it tends to delists it so checking if the sites are still indexed could be a clear way of identifying the so called "bad links."

Once you've placed a Reconsideration Request

So you'll receive a message very quickly from Google advising they have received your reconsideration request.

So how long does it take to reconsider?

From the reconsideration requests I have done we have received responses back in:

as quick as 4 days

up to 34 days

averaging at 15 days for a message return (Based on approximately 10 reinclusion requests)

Reconsideration Request Processed – You still have bad links!

So you decided to carry out a re-inclusion request, and you get the message below back; this is where the pain comes, because you're going to have a long road of trying to keep remove links you think may be bad and wait up to another month to see if its worked.

Site Reconsidered message:

If you have gone down the reconsideration request route and passed you will have received a message such as the below. Well done! Now you need to work a lot smarter and a lot harder!

Other Return Messages:

This is an earlier reconsideration processed from Google around 2010, not sure if they still send this but thought I would throw it into the mix (Key here is that Google wasn't very transparent in 2010 but at least we get an extra paragraph in the reply).

Do you own a bad site?

The message below is the one you get if you are doing really bad things with your own site i.e. Blatantly selling links, aggregating content which is not unique and generally so poor it makes no sense.

If you received this message guys then if you type your domain into Google you will probably not see it; that's right you've been deindexed!

Fix the issues on your site i.e. Remove links, change content and you may be considered again.

This does in my opinion need a reconsideration request because you've been thrown out of the index.

Conclusion:

I have carried out talks at SMX San Jose, Stockholm, London etc. and had the opportunity to network with a lot of SEO's, one thing I know is that a lot of networks didn't get hit and sites which have only used so called "white hat" techniques still received messages. Some SEO's have received messages when they have not used networks and I have seen sites receive messages for what appears to be their internal linking when they operate in multiple countries.

Also there is still a lot of bad links out there, comment spam is still everywhere and some types of article spinning seems to work very effective, while link brokers and scripts to place links are dwindling there are still very good network thriving as well as other methods of link building working effectively.

The key if you have had the message in my opinion is:

Remove any known networks, you may need to contact someone with experience in as many SEO's are out of the depth clutching at random sites to remove links from without actually taking a look at the links.

Build new links and see if rankings start to rise

If no change file a reconsideration request.

If still struggle change the page you optimise

This is not really an option for most companies but worse comes to worst 301 redirect the domain.

I think the most interesting thing I have heard lately is that in Matt Cutts key note at SMX Advanced he mentioned "Google is considering offering a tool that would let webmasters disallow certain links", this will at least level the playing field in uncertain times.

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55 Comments

Nick H

That was a great read, thanks. You nicely summarised where things are in this post Panda / Penguin era.

Neil Walker

Thanks Nick, it was a lot of data gathering but it helped me put things into perspective while gathering so i thought it would be worth sharing.

imnotadoctor - http://www.imnotadoctor.com

Great post man. Being in the industry for 7 years I feel like you crawled in my head and extracted my exact opinion about google’s recent shake up. Spot on!

Neil Walker

Thanks, i crawled inside a lot of head 🙂

Col - http://www.twitter.com/SEOsherlock

Great post Neil. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you at SMX London during the natter with Pierre Far and Sascon. Top bloke and a mighty fine rap star 😛

Neil Walker

Cheers Col, I think that was one of so many conversation with people but always good to hear direct from a googler

Jaan Kanellis - http://www.mac-forums.com/

Recently we had a site that was hit right on April 24 the date of penguin being released. We don’t do any link building, but a majority of the back links to the site have branded terms and come from other site footer links we own. Could Google demote a site for doing this? If so why would they?

Hi Jaan, The trouble with footer links is they have looked bad for a while, i must admit apart from linking to site you also own I’ve not seen footer link tactics used that often lately. But I would think it could be a devaluation of footer links, or are your site hosted on the same C-Class IP range? Taking a quick glance at your link profile i assume the majority are site wide links as you have 400,000 links across 2000 domains, I would run a test of changing this to just be a link from the home page of each domain and see the affect (That’s a lot of site wide link 🙂 )

Jaan Kanellis - http://www.mac-forums.com/

Thanks Neil. yes we are testing by removing the links completely from other iNET sites.

Patrick Mckeown - http://www.patrickmckeown.info

Great article Neil. Well put together and hopefully helps people understand the importance of good link profiles! When you coming back to North America?

Neil Walker

Thanks Patrick, hope your well I heard SMX Toronto went well for you, I’ll see if I can pitch it next year be great to catch up again after San Jose

Mansoor - http://www.mansoorsiddique.com/

I honestly believe Google has just shot themselves in the foot with this one, and though optimization of anchor text definitely should result in penalties, however so many good websites are being effected.

My personal studies have shown that you need as much as 50% of your site profile links to be naked urls?? and 15-20% with Exact anchor text seems to be doing the trick right about now.

Depending on your site link profile, but if you have a big enough site that has enough links, about about diluting the link profile with 10-20K profile links.. That has got the job done for one of my sites. Its silly but one thing that was interesting was that one of my client sites gets links very naturally, and he got hit! Lots thinking and analysing and nothing, his rankings were not improving.

Then on basically a hunch I deactivated is smart links plugin, and had the site re crawled. Within 24 hours of re crawling his site was back up and running.. go figure..

Great Article

Mansoor

Neil Walker

Hi Mansoor, thanks for the reply, SEO Smart links plugin, does seem to be an issue but one of its faults was the fact it would place links mid word i.e. seoul could contain a link for SEO (seoul). I do think anchor text variation is key, i’ve not seem it always has to be brand URL’s or brand phrases (Although that is important) but using a lot of variations of your keywords seems to work for me in respect with the other factors.

Mansoor - http://www.mansoorsiddique.com/

My point was that I had this plugged in and did not even think about it, on an off chance i deactivated it. My densities rations etc. were all correct, and I was trying to promote internal linking (and they were set up correctly with appropriate filters!) Yet anything that seems to manipulate (and i hate the word) “page rank” is being penalized.

I am not happy with on page optimization filter, because of course the new optimization is the old under-optimization lol, and that is REALLY easy to figure out..

Neil Walker

No very strange that Plugin, i had it on a few sites, and read a blog (Can’t remember which one advising what you did), I couldn’t pin point if it was said plugin or not we had made some code changes, but I removed it anyway. It had probably been used on site linking out and then Google figured the footprint and applied to all (May be), well good luck with things anyway, cheers Neil

SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 14, 2012 - pingback

[…] Unnatural Link warnings, Conspiracy theory?, David Naylor […]

Old Welsh Guy - http://www.oldwelshguy.co.uk

Nice work Neil,

Google have really got things a bit squiffy on this one, but they seem to be making inroads to a better working relationship with the people who provide the content that allows them to sell their advertising on.

They have said there will be a ‘remove this link’ option soon, and for me that will make a huge difference.

Like yourself I have seen many sites and they don’t all react the same, mainly because they are not all being punished for the same. I found that special attention on on page stuff, and looking at internal linking anchors as well as external has helped. but I am working with 2 sites that are bouncing wildly on a daily basis and that is madness given that penguin is meant to be a process rather than a live algo element i.e. it has to be run to update.

The recent Google changes have hit innocent dolphin that just happened to be swimming in the same part of the ocean as tuna. bad Google slap on the nose. Everyone loves dolphins 😀

Neil Walker

Good Point, its very easy to jump on the band wagon just about links, the difficulty with the messages is that they were closely proceeded by Penguin, On page changes still need to be reviewed and look at. Oh yes I got to Swim with Dolphins, shame they got hit 🙂

JC

Have had mixed results, and some different emails than those above. Was able to get one site back in the top 10’s after removing links, so perhaps its about taking the right ones.

Of course, if you want them to stop replying, just cite someone elses problem, or how they can’t control the top 10 for “payday loans”, how Expedia ranks for flights via hidden text, the list goes on.

Neil Walker

I know exactly what your saying there, you see a GWT message and then look at the link profiles of sites not affected, but i think this is the start, so those sites may not be affected yet, but to be fair it will be a learning curve to Google as much as ourselves.

Paul

Excellent post Neil

Agree with Mansoor the Google search results are not looking good at the moment

My main money site was hit really hard and yes did have a few links on them and maybe from a Blog network, but the site is a quality site, Links were done by a company i hired so i am kind of responsible, had links removed but still massively down on where i once was, which has taught me to be a lot more stringent with whom i hire for SEO.

However what i am greieved about is here In the UK use the search term “SEO UK” and look at the top site link profile , nothing but 1000’s of links from sites they have created all exactly the same with just 1 letter change in the URL or SEO “1000,s of local places on a server that does not resolve the site

Surely Google can see the search results and in some areas the quality has gone,

In my business sector 6 out of the original 10 have gone sub page 100 a little too harsh in my opinion only to be taken over by comparism sites with very thin content advertising the services of paid customers and no other content (money supermarket you have done well out of these updates)

Will Google fix this, im sure it will but i don’t think its going to rush to do so for the simple reason is that if people are like me and had a fair few visitors per month which 90% were wiped clean away I have no choice but to use adwords or go bust and what better way to warn / punish web masters to be careful with their linking in the future

Thanks for the read and i finally got that off my chest

Neil Walker

Yeah, i bet Google had an upsurge in Adwords costs, i suppose my view on SEO’s is if they were clear about their methods then they have not done anything wrong, and yes its very frustrating when your site gets hit but someone else has really bad links but are not picked up. I suppose my learning is No automation, i still use networks but I’m careful about the quality of the site, how its linked, who it links to, the hosting, the content, if i think it can pass a manual review 🙂

Bains - http://www.jasjotbains.com

Thanks Neil ! I got hit by Panda, but recovered after manual spam action was revoked after filing reconsideration. However rankings have been hit, especially related to images. Traffic is 10% of pre-panda traffic. Any suggestions? Site is fitnessanddefense.com

Neil Walker

Hi Jasjot, I’ll be honest I’ve had a quick look at the site and can’t see a great deal of optimisation, title could be extended somewhat, some of the images do not have usable names, there is a lot of links in each post, also the first thing on the page is a link to your Google Plus profile (Any particular reason for that). The site does have a number of sites linking to it and you seem to be creating conversation socially which is good. In terms of the articles from a quick view they are not short, but you do have Ads right at the the top of the page (Google did an update on top heavy ads sites, that could play apart.) In terms of images I’d run your site through Microsoft SEO tool kit or similar and see where each image is linked from, make sure there is no duplicate images etc. – But look at how you place your ads, thanks Neil

SEO Bomber

Nice post but seems like the draft version of it has been published. Many sentences are too long and don’t make sense, it would be great if you could revisit and reformat so it’s easier to read.

Neil Walker

I’ll have a look there, to be honest I’m pretty good at SEO (If I do say so my self); spelling and Crammer that’s a whole different story 🙂

Mansoor - http://www.mansoorsiddique.com/

totally agree… I suck at grammar too…

Old Welsh Guy - http://www.oldwelshguy.co.uk

I am the same. My old grandfather sat me on his knee one day and said ” son, don’t you worry about English, make sure your maths is right, because no-one ever loses money because they can’t spell 😀 ‘

Dear site owner or webmaster of _______,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider ______ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that could affect its ranking without a manual action by the webspam team. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If your site continues to have trouble in our search results, please see this article for help with diagnosing the issue.
Thank you for helping us to maintain the quality of our search results.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Neil Walker

Thanks, I know there is a few other message floating about.

Alesia Krush - http://link-assistant.com

Neil, great article!

This piece is a real treasure: “Another tactic I have found to identify bad links is see if they are still spidered in Google, I’m aware that if Google finds a network site it tends to delists it so checking if the sites are still indexed could be a clear way of identifying the so called “bad links.”

When the number of those Google’s warnings increased, I felt that what they were doing was “let’s try to spook SEO’s out and see what happens, maybe they will just turn in themselves”.

I wish that we, as an industry, could unite and simply ignore all those messages, since, after all , it’s not our job to sort those things out for Google. But I guess this is not realistic.

Neil Walker

I feel what your saying Alesia, Google runs the internet but because of the website which lets it find the information, Its hard looking for positives, but will get over it, if they do release the GWT add on to advise I don’t agree with this link to me, that will help individual sites, but also make it difficult as its another way for Google to collect data on what could be “bad links”.

Kerry Dye - http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/

I was just reading this, as yes, I think there is a lot of knee jerk reactions going on. But it’s hard to ignore a client who has had one of these messages and asks you to “do something” even if it was the actions of a previous SEO company that seems to have triggered it.

Maxime - http://twitter.com/dereferencement

Thanks for this thorough summary.

As you hinted, opening up the door to negative SEO may look like a suicidal move by Google.

Perhaps this whole business of “unnatural links” is actually links that Google can say with almost 100% certainty you placed yourself. They can look at the IP of the site, the link profile (a network interlinked), it can be other sites you own, or a relationship by proxy, etc.

Of course, this algorithm not being completely foolproof yet may be the reason for the current collateral damage. Google’s recent efforts as far as authorship suggests a move in that direction, profiling webmasters and their sites.

Neil Walker

Yea, I think Authorship will definitely play a big part, I’m just think how I can manipulate that 🙂

Jaan Kanellis - http://www.mac-forums.com/

So Neil do you think branded back links being over 80% of our total back links could trip this filter? See http://www.mac-forums.com.

Neil Walker

Strange question this one, because of I type in “Mac Forums” into Google.com or Google.co.uk (Non personalized etc) I get you No.1, when you say you got hit on the 24th April, what happened?

Jaan Kanellis - http://www.mac-forums.com/

So from the 24 through yesterday we have lost about 40% of all Google traffic. All different sections of the site and keywords.

Steve Ceaton - https://www.facebook.com/DeepSpaceDesign

Hi Neil,

Thought i’d let you know that the bit at the end where you say 301 redirect. This doesn’t work anymore. I tried on a site that is in a penalty, and the site flipped to the new domain and still remains in the penalty. it isn’t a brand penalty but a keyword related penalty, where it seems impossible to rank for even the least competitive of terms.

Google have really stuck it into us in 2012 eh : /

Paul

You might want to reconfirm that you do not have 2 penalty’s running simultaneously, I can confirm the a 301 does work however if your 301 a site that has been hit with panda or penguin and you have not resolved that error then the algorithmic penalty will follow, a 301 is not a magic tool that will fix all issues and you may have to address all the issues as there will be nothing you can do if the algorithm picks up on a issue

Neil Walker - http://www.seomad.com/

Hi Steve, I’m with Paul on this one, just because I physically seen it work, but interesting that it didn’t work in your case.

Old Welsh Guy - http://www.oldwelshguy.co.uk

I have to agree, unless you change the onsite issue then a simple 301 is unlikely to do the trick. In the past a 301 has always worked, then Goopgle release an update and it stops working. I often wonder if they do that in order to catch those lookign for a quick fix. ?

Jason Acidre - http://kaiserthesage.com

Hey Neil,

Excellent post, I think our team has been doing the same processes you have mentioned here (for some of our new clients that were hit by Penguin).

Just a quick question, you mentioned 301 redirecting the domain to a new one (for worst case scenarios), wouldn’t that pass the penalties/bad links to the new domain as well?

Thanks!
– Jason

Semil Shah

Neil,

I have a site which comes in 10% of 3% of 7,00,000. We have more than 50K links pointing towards my site. We identified some of the networks, and removed links, we are trying to diluted link profile as soon as possible. We field a request 20 days back and now waiting for the reply. My question is till how many days we have to wait for the reply for reconsideration request, Do I keep removing if I will not get the reply.. ? And yes site is still in serp expect but penalized.

We’ve been doing the same on our end as well. Unfortunately, Google isn’t always that responsive.

Arpita - http://www.web-design-expert.com

Hi Neil Walker,
Thanks for sharing the great post !
Google is really finding ways to block the spammers and the ‘black hat’ SEO techniques.Bad links should not come by any way.The Penguin Update has really modified the SEO techniques.

Thanks again
Regards

Hans - http://www.suchmaschinen-experte

Hi Neil.

thank you for this great information.

I will added you in my collection about Penguin, although you said, that Unnatural Link warnings at WMT and Penguin are not related directly, i think, there is a relationship to Link building. Maybe we could say, that Penguin is about the acnhor text in your link profile and WMT about the networks from where the backlinks are coming?

I am little afraid, that the changes that Google is doing since some years, shifting from a search to marketing engine (SERPs less above the fold replaced with sponsored results) will make a great part of SEOs jobless.

Greetings from Hamburg,
Hans Braumüller

Neil Walker

Hi Hans, I’d agree there although they are not the same there are key links between Penguin and the GWT messages, but yes agree that there always seems to be a monetary incentive on Google’s decisions 🙁

Hans Braumueller - http://www.suchmaschinen-experte

Hi,

i added your article in this resource list about Pinguin and Unnatural Link building WMT Message.

Both our company’s websites have been massively affected by Google’s recent Panda / Penguin update. I don’t know who to trust as it would appear the majority of companies ranked on page 1 of Google for ‘seo’ are out sourcing their work to India. I don’t think it’s fair to mention the name of the seo company as they did achieve 1st page positions for us for 7 years. I guess good things don’t last forever.

Colin - http://www.colinmcdermott.co.uk/

Lengthy stuff, thanks Neil. How deep does this conspiracy go… will be interesting to hear the inside story from Google…

Guy Manningham - http://guymanningham.com

I recently experienced a dip in my Alexa rankings and search engine results. I wonder if it’s due to unnatural links or something else.

Megrisoft - http://www.megrisoft.com

Detailed article took me more than 15 minutes to study in detail. Well written Neil on the subject

Augustine - http://www.ifixphone.co.uk/

Neil, thanks for such a vital information. It is a great post. I have learnt a lot from your post.
Thanks

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